Is it nothing though? How many Apple employees do you think use Windows? And how many Anthropic employees do you think use GitHub Copilot? I would assume the answer to both is approximately 0.
I've sworn off Sony products - well, as much as one can do so - for the past, what, 20 years? - because of that. It's kind of funny to me because I don't usually have a high opinion of "wallet activism", but one day when I was 20 I found out I had a rootkit installed on my computer by Sony and now they are _dead to me_.
But I remember when Discord began, I was actually the person who got around 10~ people onboarded onto the platform back in 2015-2018, because I simply thought it was the best way to communicate with a group of people or single person, in multiple ways like text, voice and video, with extremely low friction to do all of these things. Eventually the hold-outs joined too on their own volition, and that was because of network effects.
A platform does not start growing because of network effects, that's what keeps a platform alive and growing later on, but it starts its growth because people really prefer it to the alternatives (which back then for me was Skype and TeamSpeak).
Nowadays I'm not too happy with Discord anymore, some of it because of enshittification, but most of it is me being spoiled by what we already have, and being used to having this huge centralized (as in, can handle lots of different activities without switching to another platform) social tool that does everything I want it to, without me having to think about it at all.
Thing is, the alternatives, are not as good as Discord, and it really isn't close enough for me. Matrix would be the one I would love most to succeed, but everytime I used Matrix and Element, it's been a massive struggle, encryption constantly breaks (still), joining rooms still fails, rooms are spread about randomly, either standalone or in the new Spaces, searching for rooms is usually broken except on the large matrix.org instance, recently a bunch of rooms migrated because the event syncing completely failed and the decentralized state was broken. Not to mention the contant CSAM attacks (Does anyone know why this happens so much on Matrix? Is it really only because of the bad moderation and the fact that it auto-downloads the illegal images? Just feels so disappointing...).
I really hope we get a really good Discord alternative, maybe even an open-source and decentralized one, if possible. I would really rather not jump onto another proprietary platform.
Not if they gave me a legal document explicitly stating I didn’t need to give them anything…and I could get an infinite amount of the cookies with no extra work or money on their part…
And I would probably suggest to them that if they were interested in profiting from their cookies they should stop giving them away for free and make them commercial instead. They might then tell me they don’t want to spend the effort and money to commercialize their cookies, or maybe they prefer it as a hobby with no obligations to customers, or maybe they tell me they have a philosophical belief that they should give their their cookies away for free for anyone to do as they please with them, including commercializing them as long as they aren’t legally responsible for anything done with the cookies which is why they handed me that legal contract explicitly stating that when they gave them to me in the first place.
No because it was obvious from context clues that it was an LLM model. Not every word needs to be defined. Also if you were unsure and decided to search “MiniMax M2.1”, every result would be about the LLM.
There are at least two catches with micropayment ideas. One is transaction costs. The other is taxation.
If person in country X is accepting payments (micro or regular) directly from customers/donors in country Y they are then running an international business. That can have income tax, sale tax, VAT, and probably other tax collecting and reporting requirements in one or both countries.
It's a big can of worms you probably don't want to deal with unless you are making significant money from Y. Multiply all that by the number of different countries you get paid from.
The best way to fix the transaction fee problem is probably to use an intermediary. For micropayments people (payers and payees) have accounts at the intermediary. Payers preload their account with a payment large enough that the transaction fees are only a tiny percentage, then can direct how that money is distributed. On the payee side the intermediary waits until the payer has received enough to be able to do a transfer to the payees bank account without transaction fees eating too much.
The intermediary can also fix the tax problem. The way that works is that the intermediary operates as a legal entity in both country X and Y. Payers interact solely with the legal entity in their country, and payees interact solely with the legal entity in their country. Payers and payees then only have to deal with their own country's tax system.
The problem here is who should run the intermediary service? I doubt people will be able to agree on that. What we probably need is a system where there can be multiple intermediary services, but the services talk to each other so if say I want to donate to project Foo and Foo and I use different services I tell mine to send Foo a micropayment and my service and Foo's service make that happen.
This could work similar to the way peering works on the internet backbone.
Sounds like we need an open source index fund where you can make one payment that goes into a pool of money which is invested into the top 1000 open source projects.
It almost seems like someone ought to be able to build some kind of digital currency with low transaction fees and no centralized payment processor that could power microtransactions. I wonder why nobody has done that yet.
I know crypto was supposed to solve this problem, but I’ve never seen an implementation that actually did the job. You’d think someone would have built a successful “Patreon for micropayments” in the past 10 years, but no one has.
Yeah I think the problem is that most of the main chains had astronomical transaction fees; most of the side chains that solved this problem had a trust problem; and Bitcoin Lightning was sorta dead on arrival, though it had both the trust and the technology solution. At that point, this forum had already moved BTC from "amazing new technology" to "huge threat to social order and environment".
Sounds like the above 2 ideas should be combined.
Lightning payments are more or less free, and an index or tracker that looks at your bash history could make it possible to spread 5$ per month over all projects that you use.
> When the world is on fire and people are suffering
The problem is that the world is always on fire and people are always suffering.
Especially so because now we hear about the whole world’s problems, and no matter how peaceful a state the world is in there’s always a war or something happening somewhere. It’s been like that for all of human history and I don’t expect it to change any time soon.
I don’t think it’s healthy to live your whole live hearing about these problems that you have no ability to affect at all. In my experience it only has negative effects on your life and whether you’re tapped into the real time news feed or not, it doesn’t actually change these events in any way.
That’s like if I gave you half the dictionary and then said it’s ironic that if there really weren’t any letters after “M” you wouldn’t be complaining.
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